Classic 64
by Syberina5
Summary: Justin has *feelings* for Crayola.


Title: ? Classic 64?

Author: Syberina5 or tsarcasm

Word Count: 800 ish; complete

Fandom: 'Queer as Folk'

Rating: PG-13

Summary: Justin has _feelings_ for Crayola.

Categories: Short, Artsy!Justin, PWP, fluff, Justin POV

Beta: Shadow Padawan

Warnings: If you've ever named a crayon color for Crayola… you may want to not read this.

Disclaimer: Sue me. No really. Sue me. Take away my seven year old labtop and my framed diploma and all my school loan debt.

Author's Notes: A Justin short and standalone in the 'Block of Wood' 'Verse (conjoins in 'Part II: Adolescence' from Virginia Beach with Sam). First of all, I actually LOVE Crayola; they are the best crayons ever and they make damn fine Christmas ornaments. Second of all, not only is this my first publicly shared piece for the QaF fandom, it's not really _in_ the QaF fandom. It looks like it, reads like it, but it really can't be since I've never seen the show. Just the icons and a whole lot of fanfic (and isn't fanfic an excuse to drool over icons?). So whatever your feelings—and I do so hope you share them—on this little piece of fluff you can blame completely on freakykat, wouldbedorothy, rromantic, purplesuede, maclachlan, besamebj, innerjustin, myrna, and an enormous slew of other writers. It could be said it is really their work I am a fan of.

I hate Crayola. They have ruined so many colors for me. Not that the crayons themselves aren't awesome. Because they so fucking are. And the actual colors themselves aren't the issue.

Very little made me happier as a kid in short pants than a brand new green and yellow box of perfect little sticks of color with unused tips and names like Bittersweet, Dandelion, or Thistle. Church made bearable, boring relatives made ignorable, rain made acceptable.

But then there were the other names. Like Flesh. Really. The most heinous peach color and totally racist because it was supposed to be Caucasian flesh but no one's skin is that color unless they've used cheap self-tanner badly in an attempt to emulate Ken and Barbie.

And I know. I know flesh. I know soft, long, muscled expanses of freshly showered skin that glows a little and warms under your palm. I know pale flesh and tan flesh and dark flesh. I once fucked a man whose flesh was so deeply colored it bordered on eggplant, so beautifully even that at night, I shit you not, I found him by his smile. The curling lips and gleaming teeth floating in mid-air like the Cheshire cat and only then could you make out the glint of lights in his eyes.

Flesh is not a single color. Flesh is a million shades in one square inch of one body. And my favorite square inch—I can tell you how to make it change colors. How the push of blood beneath the skin will transform it from terribly pale to this ever so lightly kissed pink to an angry, beating red.

So, Flesh? I think not. The first thing everyone should do when they crack open a box is to yank Flesh out and snap it in two... If they even make Flesh anymore. I'm sure by now some conscientious lesbian has complained about exposing the Youth of America to such stereotypes and Crayola has been forced to rename it Tangerine or Over-Ripe Peach.

So I don't hate the crayons—those I love—I hate the dumb executives who name them because no one who actually had a hand in mixing the colors, in creating them would ever think it looked like skin, let alone Flesh.

Today I hate Crayola for a whole new reason.

I used to love Sea Green. Really, it was bright and blueish and awesome. But then I went to the sea, the actual sea, and I was so excited thinking that _that_ was what the water was actually going to look like.

Such a fucking joke. And the biggest farce Crayola has ever perpetuated. There is nothing sea-like about Sea Green. The sea—the real sea not the water in those amazing, perfect beach shots travel agents push at you—is almost fucking brown. It may be practically clear when you take a handful or a bucketful of it but when you take an oceanful it is pretty much greenie-brown. Or brownie-green.

So in my youth I spat on Sea Green. Sure, I still used it—it's a great color—but every time I found a Sea Green—whether or not it was my box of crayons—I ripped the wrapper of that bitch. It was false advertising and I wasn't gonna let them get away with it.

And the worst part was… I love the actual color of the sea. How deep and hidden it is, how you can watch a wave separate off from the rest of the ocean and it becomes almost pearlescent and you can see the sun eking though and a piece of seaweed, bark, or a fish you never would have known was there. And then it crests and crashes and foams (don't even get me started on Sea Foam) at the mouth and it's amazing and then it's part of the _huge_ ocean again.

I have never ever found a crayon that is actually that color.

And it took me a long time—till fucking today—to realize I shouldn't have been looking for a crayon that color but a pair of eyes that color because I'd been staring into them and coming my brains out for years.

I don't know why I never really noticed. The sea with its changeable depths and him with his mercurial eyes. The way a storm brewing can turn them into a forbidding harshness. Just like that inch of flesh—or any other inch on his body—I know how to change the shades in his irises. Just like the sea, a few rays of sunshine pushing though can reveal things you would never know were there.

So if someday Crayola's mixologists do finally get it right—because Sea Green is already taken—I'm gonna to petition them to name it Brian Kinney.


End file.
